ShinRa's Fall
by Shadow Haloed Angel
Summary: To the world Rufus ShinRa is a flawless and unintelligible enigma wrapped in rumour and lies. In the twisting and corrupt corridors of ShinRa there is only one who truly knows him. Will Rufus fall from grace for the only one who knows him?
1. Chapter 1

_My fall will be for you, my love will be in you, if you be the one to cut me I'll bleed forever_

Rufus ShinRa. President of the company; President of the world.

His ice-blue eyes were cold as his soul, and shone from that impenetrable, statuesque facade.

No emotion flitted across those marble features whether it was joy, fear, grief... never the merest hint of the machinations of that clockwork mind.

There were those who claimed that he never bled. No knife was sharp enough to cause a crimson stain to spread across the snow-white landscape of his suit.

In the shadowy corners of the halls of power came still more furtive whispers - he had inherited his father's perversions; he was a robot puppeteered by the elder ShinRa; he was a product of the science department... even in the upper echelons of the company there were few, if any, who had an idea of the truth about the young man behind the web of rumour and exaggeration, the leader cloaked in a tissue of other's lies.

Only one person in existence had any inkling of the truth behind the illusion of a god-like, ruthless, flawless ruler.

He had been called many things and compared to many things in his time, but only two such sobriquets remained. One born of fearful respect, the other born of the hate that fear engendered: ShinRa's panther, and ShinRa's dog.

He found it intriguing the way such appelations stripped him of his independence, designating him company property in the public consciousness.

Upon membership of the Turks, identity was lost and all individuality stripped away. They were the anonymous blue shadows enforcing company policies and wishes, an official secret police. That is how it had been, and he, ever the traditionalist, preserved the old ways.

Those old ways were no longer confined to the traditions of his erstwhile 'family', but in the increased liberality he also preserved those of his extinct birthplace and culture. A survivor of the Wutaiain holocaust, he worshipped the old god and observed the ancient protocols and etiquette, though he never enforced such traditions on his subordinates.

Joining the Turks was resigning whatever life you had known before - your reasons were always your own, unknown to those around you. If you wholeheartedly accepted that life, your colleagues became your family. If you held back any regrets, the chance to build a new life would be forever beyond your reach, and you would be eliminated from the running - albeit humanely - by one of the others who never had a chance to become your sibling.

Loyalty was everything in the Turks, and aithfulness to the company overrode all. Friendships did not, could not survivve, and the last kindness offered to a traitor could only be that of a quick death.

He had joined the Turks of his own volition, for self-protection and through fascination with this all-powerful oppressor.

Since that day he had weathered storms of blood, snuffed out countless sparks of life and steadfastly climbed the ladder to the leadership of this tight-knit, deadly family.


	2. Chapter 2

When he was ordered to the President's office, the Head of the Department of Administrative Research hardly batted an eyelid, inwardly wondering what demands would be made of himself and his Turks in the service of the company, or merely in submission to ShinRa's vanity, today.

Rufus was sitting in the startlingly modern office, behind his glass and brushed steel desk, ignoring the other for a few moments, studying the file in his hand. Tseng paid that no attention, he was used to mind games, and while the other was by no means an amateur, this power play was so blatant it could be disregarded.

"Sir..." The Wutaiain's tone was dry, but perfectly respectful, and the President's ice blue eyes flicked up, cold as ever. The man gave the slightest of nods, indicating that Tseng could approach.

Meanwhile, behind the desk, Rufus' heart was in his mouth. He seemed hypersensitised to the other's presence, every fibre of his being prickling with awareness. He didn't know what was going on, never in his seventeen years had he felt like this. People were an inconvenience he tolerated, and whilst he would be prepared to admit that if he _liked_ anyone it would be Tseng, he had never felt like THIS before.

The Head Turk regarded him with a faint aura of disgust as he sat there, expression betraying nothing as usual.

Rufus put his pen down and steepled his fingers in front of him moentarily, before moving to push the file he had been studying across the desk towards the older man. Tseng took it without a word and began leafing through it. An eyebrow arched at the sight of the first page.

"Reno? Really?"

Rufus nodded

Tseng paused in the grip of indecision.

"Have you any proof?"

"It's in the file."

"It's circumstantial. Do you have anything more than conjecture and dislike?"

"You forget your place Tseng. You are a servant of ShinRa, as is he, though at least _you_ are loyal."

"I don't believe it. Reno is my Turk. I trust him more than any other muckrakers you might have paid to fabricate these allegations."

"You are speaking out of turn." Rufus' tone was harsh with venom now, words hissing through the air like a whip. "You will do your duty, and terminate him."

Tseng watched him imperterbably, and Rufus raged like the teenager he was in spite of his lofty position. Rank made no difference to maturity. At times like this he really _was_ no better than a spoilt child.

"ShinRa made you Tseng, and it can destroy you just as easily."

With that the Turk's expression flickered for a moment as almost unsurpressable rage coursed through him. How dare Rufus speak to him like that, even if he was the President? He was a Turk, a proud Turk, not some lapdog to do his master's bidding without question. He stood, taking the file, and leaving without a word.

Rufus shook as the other left in silence. He had never seen Tseng so angry before, and it scared him.


	3. Chapter 3

AN: I am SO sorry for the ridiculous delay in this. I ran out of plot, and then got run over by life in the form of a steamroller. Either way, I'm going to write the next chapter, possibly next two chapters now, so that I have something to upload again soon.

Reno lay in bed, unmoving, seemingly asleep. He was at least in a stupor, most probably alcohol induced. It seemed to be how he spent most of his time these days.

Ever since he'd been a boy, he'd only wanted to be a Turk. It had been the dream that got him through those endless nights, what he'd thought about while his body was used, letting his mind drift off elsewhere. Even now he shook his head at the naivety of that kid.

One of the things the Turks had promised was anonymity. A fresh start. Just what a slum kid needed. Except that everyone knew he was a slummer the second he opened his mouth. Most platers openly sneered at him, the other cadets muttered insults behind his back, or shouted them at him as he walked past.

Once he was a Turk, he'd never have to whore again. That was what he had promised himself, but it wasn't that simple. It never damn well was. Some Turk missions sent him to the Honeybee or other brothels, sometimes he thought the superiors did it for a joke. He knew he was 'the best one for the job' but those weren't the jobs he wanted to be good at doing. Instead of a Turk, a cool assassin, he was nothing but the company whore, and noone ever let him forget it. Everyone knew whores could be bought.

Reno drank to forget. Not forget anything in particular, but to forget what he had been, and what he was now. he wasn't sure whether being a whore or a joke was worse, but he knew the joke would get more serious. Talk travelled fast. Soon enough the higher-ups would hear about it, and either he would become the company whore, and be expected to do nothing more than play at being a Turk and bend over their desks, or he'd be fired. Literally.

No-one left the Turks. You didn't retire, there was no pension plan, partially because the life expectancy was so low. If you were deemed unfit for the job anymore, you simply...disappeared.

What made Reno angrier than anything else was the fact that he didn't deserve to be disappeared. He was loyal to the company, or, if not actually to the company, then to Tseng. He was under no illusion about the fact that the Wutaiain was the only reason he had made it as far as he did. They were both outcasts, the slummer and the Wutaiain, and he knew Tseng had kept an eye on him as he had struggled through training, even suspected the other was the one orchesrating his promotion, but that didn't make it any easier to deal with the rest of the shit.

His alarm blared and the redhead ignored it, muttering profanity and kicking it off the nightstand with a flail of his leg. The shrill siren had cut through his head like a knife through butter. Ah well, he began forcing himself to rise, work was work, and he'd be a Turk till the day he died, whether that was sooner or later he didn't care.


	4. Chapter 4

The icy blonde returned to his paperwork, imperturbable mask once more in place. He had to forget what had just happened, he could not afford weakness, not after the effort he had gone to to create his reputation as the man who never bled, nor cried. His father had forced him to become a man far too early, and now he was practically a God. He did what was expected of him, burying himself in the paperwork, determined to be perfect. There was no flaw in perfection which could be exploited, hammered open. When he was perfect there would be no more weakness.

Sometimes he remembered those first days with Tseng, when they had both been so much younger, the bodyguard only a few years his elder assigned to protect him. Maybe it was his imagination, but the sun seemed warmer in those memories, those good old days before he had realised what being his father's heir truly meant. The days when he used to smile. They had grown close, but Rufus had started pushing the other away as they aged, at first not wanting to risk hurt to Tseng, and then for his own selfish reasons. One day the bodyguard had knocked in his door out of hours and pleaded for an explanation. Rufus had screamed at him that there had never been anything to explain, that he, Tseng, was a public relations nightmare, a scandal waiting to happen, and that he wasn't wanted.

The next day Tseng had turned up to work as usual, but the blinds had come down, and Rufus had never again seen those eyes sparkle for him the way they used to. Tseng was a tool now, just like him, and though neither of them showed any sign of the conflict or what had gone before, Rufus wondered if it haunted the imperturbable Wutaiain like it haunted him. He took some vindictive pleasure in making Tseng do assignments like this, making sure it was the other who eliminated Turks when they were superfluous to requirements. He knew it killed Tseng inside, because like a good Head of Department, he cared for his subordinates, but he hoped that if he could drive Tseng to hate him enough, then it might be strong enough to overcome the feelings he still had for the other. He kept pushing him away, he couldn't stand closeness, vulnerability, but he missed the friend he had once had.

Lost in these thoughts, the blonde was unaware of footsteps approaching softly over the thick pile carpet of his office. A rag was clamped roughly over his nose and mouth, and, even as he started to struggle, the world swirled away to black. Rather than panic, Rufus felt only a deadly calm, accepting this fate. Sometimes he had no energy left to fight.


	5. Chapter 5

Rufus tensed, a vain effort to stop the involuntary shivering of his body. Such shivering was a sign of weakness after all, and he could not afford any cracks in his perfect facade. His ice blue eues roved the dark surroundings, but for all the perfection of his mask, he had not had the training of a Turk, and his panic showed in his eyes, betraying the superficiality of the imperturbable veneer.

Judging by the smell, he was somewhere in the slums. His guts twisted a little in what felt oddly like fear. He had utmost confidence in his Turks, of course, but the slums were a honeycomb of vice and corruption, and he had just ordered the elimination of the only member who knew it like the back of his hand. He didn't doubt Tseng's loyalty to him, he couldn't allow himself to. If he did, everything would fall apart.

The icy blonde decided to trust that his purpose was ransom, and contented himself with mental images of Tseng, his Tseng, bursting in to save him, his hero in a dark suit. He closed his eyes and ignored the chink of the chains that bound his ankles. Such a nightmare was only a dream. Tseng would save him, just like he had every other time.

* * *

Reno was playing the slum-boy again, everybody's friend, trying to slip back into his old life. The problem with being a Turk was that it became part of you, for better or worse, and you couldn't turn it off. He heard all the whispered conversations around him, the dirty deals, even more clandestine down here than up among the richness of the plate. When you have little in the world, its loss is more disastrous than the equivalent to one who has more in the world. Slummers guarded themselves and their livelihoods jealously.

"Yeh, we snatched 'im earlier, righ' under Slant-eyes' nose. They'd been yellin. Lover's tiff ya reckon? I be' blondey loves gettin' nailed by that Wutaiain whore, don' he look like the perfect bedroom bitch?"

Reno frowned and took another gulp of his beer. Slant-eyes was what the slummers called Tseng, for obvious reasons. From what they were saying it seemed possible, even likely, that it was Rufus they'd kidnapped. While his first reaction was malicious glee, that inner Turk wouldn't stop whispering to him about 'duty'.

"Bullshit." Reno muttered to himself, and drank deeper, but the fact remained that duty was duty. You didn't have to like what you did, or the bastards you did it for, but you did it because that was your job. You took the shit and did the job in front of you. That was what being a Turk meant. Despite the doubts and the slurs, he had learned the hardest lesson. He was a Turk from the core of his battered soul, whether in uniform or out of it, whether it was official or not, and a Turk would not let kidnappers get their hands on ShinRa's vice-president without doing something about it.

He moved closer to the men who had been talking with an easy grin.

"Couldn' help hearin' abou' ya bitta luck. Cn I buy ya a drink?"


	6. Chapter 6

Unsettling did not do justice to the sheer weight of cold dread which twisted like a knife in Tseng's guts when that call came through. Rufus. Missing. He was up in the vice-president's office, searching for any sign of what happened, giving orders for the CCTV footage to be checked. When the message came back that the cameras 'seemed to have lost transmission from that vicinity' he swore under his breath. It wasn't to say he was surprised, because anyone who had managed to penetrate security to this level was blatantly no amateur, and would certainly have taken care of the most obvious surveillance features. He had to hope that some of the other methods of gathering intelligence in circumstances like this had been overlooked.

Eventually some data was sent to his PHS and Tseng immediately sent a page to all Turks, high priority. Soon enough they were all assembled, but as his eyes roved the ranks, the distinct lack of red hair did nothing to calm Tseng's nerves. Something didn't feel right about this. Rufus' disappearance less than an hour after he had ordered Reno's elimination could, of course, be purely coincedental, but Turks did not believe in coincidence, not without verifying it independently for themselves.

* * *

Reno paused in the doorway of the back room, looking in at the familiar figure restrained there. The chains made him look smaller, weaker somehow, but when Rufus' glacial eyes flickered open it was clear enough that the increase in belligerence radiating from him was an attempt to compensate for the vulnerability of his position. The redhead sauntered in, the artificial light making the colour of his hair seem even brasher than usual, so vivid it almost hurt to look at. He said nothing, and nor did the blonde, a classic stalemate. Sheer hate, colder than ice, radiated from Rufus' suspended form, and the atmosphere grew suffocating.

"Lookin good as ever boss man..." Reno began casually, sauntering up. Rufus did not respond again, too mature to do something like spit at him, the only sign that he had heard at all a flash in his eyes. Even with the other restrained, Reno wasn't suicidal enough to try laying his hands on the man.

"Seems ta me ya gonna have ta start screamin pretty soon boss man... we wouldn' wan' em comin back in jus ye'..."

Rufus bared his teeth in a silent snarl. He knew he had been right to order Reno's elimination now. The traitor.

"I span 'em a yarn... ya know how I cn talk... some bullshit sob story abou' how ShinRa had screwed me over, how I had a score ta settle wi' ya. Weren exacly difficult ta ge' them to believe it. There ain' hardly a person down here ShinRa ain't screwed over." Reno circled him, and it was only now that Rufus could see below that haphazard and careless exterior to the wiry predator beneath, the part of Reno that was definitely and unquestionably Turk. The blonde's breathing quickened. It was alright, Reno had said that it was a story he'd span them... but how was Rufus to know if that was really what the Turk believed, or if Reno really knew the truth, how much he was being used by the company. How Rufus himself had betrayed him. He had to hope.

"Alright, so you've got me. Was this your idea?"

Reno's head jerked round sharply "Wha was tha? Ya think this was my idea? My fuckin idea ta ge' ya kidnapped?" his rage was boiling over now, all the resentment which had accumulated since the first snide comment, the first muttered joke "You think jus like the rest of em don ya, m some fuckin whore who'll sell ou' anyone fer the righ amoun, jus as easy as I used ta sell myself. 'M a slummer righ'? It takes a slummer ta know wha' real loyalty is. When someone's saved ya from tha' shithole, saved ya LIFE, then ya loyal ta them. You upper-crust bastards don' have the first fuckin clue what real loyalty is. I don' give a shit abou' the company, bu I'm loyal to Tseng, an he's your man through an through. If I were wha' ya made me, I'd leave ya here ta rot, I wouldn give a shit, I'd be fucking dancing fer joy ta see you take some of the shit I did..." he grabbed a chain, and fear flickered in the blue-grey orbs of Rufus' eyes. Electricity crackled, unseen in the air along their gazes, but Reno's hand released the chain gently after a moment, and the redhead turned away.

"Bu' I ain' wha you make me. I'm wha' I made myself. 'M a Turk. Notta whore. I'm company property. An tha' means I'm gonna do my job, and I'm gonna ge' you ou'."


	7. Chapter 7

Rufus remained hanging there, motionless, staring at the flame-haired coiled spring who was evidently so close to snapping. He could see the similarities now between his Tseng and this beer-soaked trainwreck of a Turk. Wait, his Tseng? Where had that come from? The thought took him by surprise, though that surprise was at least in part at the realisation that Tseng could conceivably be anything other than his. He had never before considered that possibility, subconsciously counting all Turks as company property. His property. It was a relief to hear it from the redhead's own lips at least, what had he said?

"Tseng's your man, through and through" or something like that anyway. It felt like a weight on his shoulders had lifted. A figurative weight, obviously, as those parts of his anatomy were still very much supporting a large portion of his body mass.

Reno was leaning over him, doing something to the cuffs around his wrists. He frowned as noises seemed to be approaching from outside this back room which passed for a cell.

"Star' screamin' boss..." he muttered "We don' need company righ' now..."

"What the hell do you mean, screaming?" was the icy response.

Reno raised an eyebrow "Look, i' ain' exacly rocket science sunshine, they think I'm in here ta bea' the crap outta you, an' take my revenge, so they're gonna ge' suspicious if it don' soun like I'm hurtin' ya, therefore you screamin woul' be conducive ta them leavin us the fuck alone long enough fer me ta ge' you outta these cuffs."

Rufus paused, lost for a sarcastic retort for the first time in his life. Reno made a good point. The was one problem with it, however, was that Rufus ShinRa had never screamed in his life, and had no idea whatsoever how to feign the sounds of torture. Reno's eyes were glittering now, hard as diamonds, but sapphire-blue.

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The Department of Administrative Research was a whirlwind of activity as Tseng organised a team. Whilst they had no direct information, Tseng was prepared to do something he never had before, and act on a hint. He would do almost anything to retrieve Rufus safely. With nothing to go on, however, even their best guess was a shot in the dark.

insert line break here

Rufus rubbed his wrists as Reno threw the cuffs off into a corner. The redhead rested his EMR on his shoulder and turned, catching Rufus' eye and jerking his head as a silent sign to follow. The blonde nodded and the two began moving swiftly, the shadowy predators they had both been born. Reno was holding his breath, even now. This part of the mission, when you didn't know if you'd make it out alive would never cease to scare him shitless. He could see the dull light of the under-plate, the doorway which was their first step to safety, and he couldn't help but release a little sigh as they walked through it.

Then something blocked the dim light which filtered down, and suddenly the vicegrip of fear returned.

"Keepin' him ta yaself, huh? Ya know, Red, i' ain't nice ta keep a prize like tha' ta yaself... ya bein' selfish... an we don like selfish..."


End file.
